Do you know what the global edtech and smart classroom market size was in 2022? No idea? Next, we have to inform you that it was somewhere around USD 115.80 billion, which is estimated to grow from USD 133.55 billion in 2023 to USD 433.17 billion in 2030. Yes, you read that right! And among everyone who contributed to these numbers, Physics Wallah is a well-known name. But did you know that there was a time when this edtech brand first launched its app, which crashed because countless authorized users logged into the app at the same time? In short, the application in question failed to meet the increasing demand of users due to its poor performance, scalability and resilience, resulting in a huge loss to the business. Now, if you don’t want to experience the same in any way, you have to rely on scalable digital products.
Yes, only when you do this, you will be able to develop a strong digital product that can easily survive and thrive in the market. But the question is: what are scalable products and why should you use them? Well, to get that right, you’ll have to go through the next bunch of text.
What do you mean by scalable products?
These products generally refer to the software application’s ability to handle increasing demand, complexity, or usage of the mobile program without affecting its quality, performance, and functionality. Product scalability is one of the key factors that determine the success and growth of any virtual application.
Because not all digital products are good at scalability, a startling survey by a business-focused media organization found that only 8% of agencies manage to scale throughout their operations.
Can you give some examples of scalable digital products?
The case here is that John Young introduced the RS/6000 SP operating system as a scalable system in one of his books titled “Exploring IBM’s New Age Mainframes.” But why? You might want to know. Well, that’s because of the RS/6000 SP’s ability to maintain its level of performance even after adding additional processors.
Another example of scalable products on this list is scalable fonts. Yes, you heard right! In the printing domain, scalable fonts can be effortlessly resized depending on the requirement without losing quality.
With that done, it’s time to understand the key information about:
Why should you focus on product scalability?
Frankly, if you want to grow and meet the increasing demands of your users while remaining competitive in the market, it makes sense to make your product extensible. Let’s dive deep into the details:
Meet growing demand
Horizontal scaling allows you to connect more devices or servers to your existing infrastructure to handle increased traffic and distribute the load evenly. Vertical scaling, on the other hand, concentrates on upgrading current hardware for better performance and potential while creating a scalable product.
Improve performance and reliability
If you decide to distribute the workload across different servers or implement load balancing techniques, it becomes easy to:
- Reduce latency
- Manage peak loads efficiently
- We guarantee a flawless user experience
Implement effective capacity planning
Some industry experts say that when you have scalable digital products, chances are you can accurately predict resource requirements and distribute them accordingly to ensure excellent performance and avoid overprovisioning or underutilized resources.
Therefore, if you are willing to build a mobile app that can grow with your business, you must have a casual conversation with the dedicated representatives of a top IT service provider that provides promising app development services.
When should you build scalable products?
As a responsible app owner, you need to sell your offerings and meet your consumers’ expectations in terms of features and performance. While product scalability was not your priority years ago, now you need to scale your output to support its growth. And one of the clear signs of the need to extend your product is when its performance starts to deteriorate.
For example, a software application may experience reduced performance when the user’s battery begins to use it at the same time. Then you need to look at key metrics, such as:
- Memory usage
- CPU usage
- Disk I/O
- Network I/O
If any of them need further improvement to handle the increased load, you must fulfill the same. What else? Some industry experts suggest proactively analyzing a series of indications to determine when to proceed with product scalability and when not to. If you do this, you won’t have to wait for your application’s performance to drop significantly. Instead, you’ll be able to optimize it ahead of time.
In addition, you can ask yourself several important questions:
- Do you have business value to deliver to a large consumer base? If so, there is a lot of room for your business to grow and you should invest adequately in the scalability of your product.
- Have you already made an outstanding product? Have you received feedback from your target market confirming that you have a superior product? If the answer is yes, don’t hesitate to expand your product.
Keep in mind that building scalable applications is not for everyone. And if you can’t build a scalable app properly, you can’t expect to achieve aggressive growth and generate significant revenue in the future. Perhaps that’s why a popular insight firm found in its research that less than 0.01% of all user-based mobile programs had a chance to become financially successful in 2018.
Finally, it’s time to talk about the most awaited topic in this text, i.e.
How to complete the scalability task of the entire product
Leverage customer feedback and data collection
Quantitative analytics and research are two flawless methods for gathering customer feedback that can inform you of a successful expansion plan. By paying attention to their responses, you can learn what next features to add to your scalable products, then optimize and retest. With such a plan in place, you can be sure that your application will evolve and adapt to market demands in the future.
For example, it will help if you collect real data from users when they use your software during the MVP phase. Tracking user behavior, user journey, abandonment and interactions at every touchpoint can help you identify functionalities that can be improved, added or deleted from scalable digital products as you move from the MVP stage to full launch.
Keep in mind that it is necessary to go through all the positive and negative comments and find a way to resolve them. Are you wondering why? Well, unhappy customers are the ones who will highlight problems in your application that you can solve when you move from the MVP stage to full scalable product development. And in case you need some kind of technical assistance to build a scalable application, you can always count on a reliable cloud IT service provider with expertise in software development services.
Select the correct database drive
The next thing you need to do is to choose the most suitable database engine and create an exceptional plan or model to ensure that your product scales without any problems. So when demand picks up, you’ll be ready to easily process a significant number of transactions using this approach.
Keep in mind that replicating your database might be a perfect idea when your web application scales. And just so you know, this replication process involves imitating the database so that there are several copies of it, each of which can take care of a subset of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) tasks. It is accepted industry practice to split database read and write operations when creating scalable digital products.
Put APIs first
You may not believe it, but the truth is that the emergence of API-first software architecture has been one of the most beneficial innovations in the field of software design. Previously, APIs were produced as an afterthought for existing applications and were also complicated. Today, API-first design actually separates them from the beginning, allowing teams to quickly build experiences and products compatible with several endpoints. The API-first methodology insists on tapping APIs to connect all parts of the platform and transfer key data between them when building scalable products.
Call for continuous integration and continuous delivery
Just as Agile increases productivity, CI/CD procedures take it to the next level, ensuring rapid release of scalable digital products with fewer problems. The key is the widespread adoption of continuous automation throughout all stages of development, resulting in simpler and more consistent code development.
This is something that acts as an imperative when you want to integrate new functionalities or perform product scalability tasks. You might have seen many software developers these days working in parallel on web application development projects, which takes productivity to a higher level and also increases the probability of errors. If this happens, you will have to spend a huge amount of time putting together different parts of the program that were constructed by different developers. However, the good news is that this problem is solved with the help of CI/CD tools.
Now that you have thought carefully about the right method for scaling a digital product, it is time to move on to the last but most important topic from our point of view, ie.
What is the cost of the entire digital transformation project?
Just so you know, every transformation project is unique and different. The total cost to develop fully scalable digital products will vary depending on the following:
- Your organization
- His industry
- The type of transformation required
- A wide variety of other factors
According to the top CXO-focused online knowledge source, the average digital transformation project can cost you $27.5 million based on a 2020 report. If you want to understand what expenses are required to work on your specific product scalability task, it’s a wise decision to connect with the most knowledgeable manager of a renowned agency for the provision of IT services.
The Rundown
By now you’ve learned the importance of making your product scalable over time. Law? Because every day the needs, preferences and expectations of customers change. If you’re in the market to provide them with the best possible product or service, you also need to make sure they can access them anytime, anywhere. But to guarantee the same, you will need to design fully scalable digital products that can serve hundreds of thousands of consumers at the same time. For this, it is advisable to work with a well-established IT solution provider that now specializes in creating scalable products.